Rural industrial restructuring in China’s metropolitan suburbs: Evidence from the land use transition of rural enterprises in suburban Beijing

China’s rural areas has witnessed a rapid and far-reaching transition in the past decades, following which thousands of “hollowed villages” in China’s traditional agricultural areas has mushroomed. While in the metropolitan suburbs, such a transition has led to the functional evolution and industrial restructuring of the rural settlements. Industrial upgrading and land intensive use in the urban areas, coupled with the tightening construction land quotas, has affected the land use morphology of the suburban rural settlements directly and/or indirectly. This paper explores the rural industrial restructuring by evaluating the land use transition of the rural enterprises in suburban Beijing. Based on the spatial land use data and field work, a clear spatial differentiation of the land use morphology has been found in the study area, which involves not only the dominant morphology like land use structure, but also the recessive morphology like the land ownership and intensification of the production factors. Then, a rural enterprise index which combines three main changes on the land use morphology was developed to demonstrate the spatial combination characteristics of the rural enterprises. The results indicate that with an increasingly open market of collective construction land, Beijing’s suburban rural areas have been well integrated with the urban industries and functions spilling over from the central city. This is considered as a process of rural industrial restructuring from endogenous industrialization towards exogenous industrialization. Land use transition of the rural enterprises has released a strong policy demand for the system reform of the rural construction land. The deepening rural land system reform will contribute to the sustainable development of China’s rural industrialization and urbanization.